5 updates to one post is enough...
Matt Yglesias writes:
What Jonathan Alter said about the gas tax. Beyond that, though, it's worth saying that real harm is done to people's lives by this sort of gimmickry. It's not at all clear to me that ordinary voters understand that the underlying supply and demand trends make it overwhelmingly likely that the cost of gasoline will continue, on the whole, to move upwards in the future. But that's the reality -- the market will fluctuate and it's possible that policy choices about the SPR can influence those fluctuations, but we're not finding new sources of cheap oil at the same rate that global economic growth is making people want to burn more oil.
Actually, it is clear: Unless voters are subject to a long, sustained education campaign, they don't understand energy policy at all.
It really is amazing to me how much political science already knows, and how little of that knowledge makes it out into the wider world.
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